Moonlight Amaryllis
♪smoke and mirrors♪
...Thank you so much, 7 tyranitars.
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Atheist & Agnostic Family
- Thread starter Darato
- Start date
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...Thank you so much, 7 tyranitars.
AzukanAsimbu
Petal Paladin
I'm personally not a fan of deism. Its really, as Dawkins described it, "watered down theism." Its really just a last resort to theism. Its the "well its not the Christian God, but I still want to believe."
Ah, well, that's understandable. I haven't retained plenty of the information about physical and chemical laws I learned back in high school, and I paid pretty close attention to learning them. Knowledge you don't use tends to fade over the years, and if you start out potentially resistant to it anyway, chances are you're not going to understand it all that well no matter what.
I guess it might be described as a sort of "last resort" compared to theism, but I'd say it's because it's much harder to counter the idea of a very minimalist "prime mover" sort of deism than it is to counter the various personal and complex kinds of god you find in theism. Traditional arguments for God's existence all fail to prove any specific god, but they point to a deistic entity to the extent that they convincingly point to anything at all. So even if you can really show how unlikely, unnecessary, and undesirable a theistic God might be, those arguments don't really touch a deistic conception. And given our best cosmologies today are still only just scraping at the kinds of explanations for how there's something rather than nothing (particularly since that latest report about the unfortunate and perplexing lack of evidence for antimatter/dark matter that our inflation-expansion and flat universe theories depend on), an original something to oomph the rest of it into action remains a respectable option.
That sounds awfully deistic of me, doesn't it? I don't happen to be a deist, but I guess I can accept the more or less reasonability of the points made in its defense. *shrug*
Moonlight Amaryllis
♪smoke and mirrors♪
But isn't it just believing in nature?
Ooh, nice question!
Any more questions about my virginity will be met with a slap.
7 tyranitars
Well-Known Member
.AzukanAsimbu
Petal Paladin
Believing in Nature isn't deism. I guess that could a personal form of pantheism or paganism
Moonlight Amaryllis
♪smoke and mirrors♪
I'll look it up.
7 tyranitars
Well-Known Member
Diesm is more like you believe there was a supernatural being who set everything in motion but left afterwards.
Moonlight Amaryllis
♪smoke and mirrors♪
Makes a little more sense than Christianity and all that stuff.
Pokemon Geek
Doom Trainer
Yes, it makes more sense than the mayor religions, but it still has no logical explenation to it.
Moonlight Amaryllis
♪smoke and mirrors♪
I was reading this book, and apparently God is an Invisible Flying Clown. '-_-
AzukanAsimbu
Petal Paladin
It would imply that the creator had to have a creator of itself, which leads to an infinite regress of creator beings.
Also there is no evidence of such a being. "Beauty of nature" doesn't count.
Moonlight Amaryllis
♪smoke and mirrors♪
The catch to religion really just is "believe and great reward will come your way at death". People simply think that "OMG we should believe because we will go to heaven!". But where is the proof?
AzukanAsimbu
Petal Paladin
I think thats why people always get duped by Pascal's Wager. It is either, believe and be rewarded or don't believe and be punished. Theists haven't really stopped to question, "Is there even a reward or punishment?"
Moonlight Amaryllis
♪smoke and mirrors♪
There is no proof for either, seeing its the "afterlife" sort of thing. Heaven vs Hell, you know?
UnovaMaster
Well-Known Member
So I have an old friend who got a controlling girlfriend this year that turned him into a Christian and made him go from Bi to Straight. Now he's not himself anymore. What should I do?
AzukanAsimbu
Petal Paladin
Remind him of who he is. Don't let an oppressive relationship make him into something he isn't. I've been through it myself and i was fortunate to realize it and break away.
That's a sufficient question to end the discussion in most cases, but if I was a deist and really wanted to press the issue, I'd say that the universe and a deity are two different ... (well, I would typically say either "things" or "matters" here, but as the next couple of sentences will show, those words don't actually work here!). The universe is material and a deity is immaterial so their "beginnings" aren't the same kinds of events. The universe is a something and so does need a measurable start as all things[/i[ do, but a deity is not a something. A deity might be (and has been) described as the "essence of existence" or the "eternal force that is" or some other pseudomystical gobbledegook that doesn't really translate into understandable, definite terms or concepts. So one probably does need a finite beginning, while one may or may not need such a beginning - the point is they're not perfectly comparable on the "eternal" question.
But it's still a flawed and useless response to your question, because we don't - can't? - know much at all, if anything, about the nature of such an immaterial whatchamacallit and can't yet say it's the case with any confidence. All it gives us is a might-be of a possibility, and to rely on it as an explanation is no less a "god of the gaps" fallacy than those we encounter in the argument over evolution. (You read my review, after all, and see how I attempt to critique the idea of eternal and irreducibly complex immaterial entities, so rest assured I'm not advocating the argument - just explaining it.)
Either way, deism survives some of the arguments that demolish theism.
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